System Challenges for Collaborative Virtual Environments

Abstract

According to Professor Fred Brooks, virtual environment (VE) research has reached a point where it “barely works” (Brooks, 1999). We interpret this to mean that, although the technology has advanced to a point where many things are possible, there are still inadequacies which prevent its application to real-world problems. This difficulty of getting virtual reality (VR) to work adequately is due to a wide range of things: some are hardware-related, some depend on better algorithms and techniques, and yet others are related to human factors issues. This very diversity has led to some fragmentation in research: different groups study focused, tractable problems; solutions for one problem do not necessarily integrate easily with others, and technological limitations often frustrate attempts to scale up the results for larger real-world tasks. Gluing together the solutions for individual components of the problem is not guaranteed to work, and we can see evidence that the overall task is hard from the lack of convincing industrial-strength examples. Finding a solution for a real-world problem requires that diverse ideas and solutions be combined in some way. Before VR can move from a research-based subject into mainstream applications, ways must be found to integrate ideas from the contributing disciplines into a coherent architectural framework, designed to support systematic application development. Our own work, which is briefly touched upon in this chapter, is concerned with deriving such a system architecture.